Will Lochamy: This bathroom nonsense is nonsense. Stop It.

I like being comfortable. You like being comfortable. All God’s children like being comfortable. Lately, we’re concentrating a lot on that first sentence. Over a million people have signed an American Family Association boycott pledge against Target’s bathroom policy. It’s pretty much everyone’s bathroom policy and always has been, but Target happened to come right out and say it.

They decided to clarify that people can and should use the bathroom that coincides with the gender they identify with. Clarity is causing all of this hysteria, yet actual clarity on this issue continues to elude so many. Let me clarify…

Gender Dysphoria is a real thing. It’s not a punchline, so stop joking around.This is the formal diagnosis for people (Homo Sapiens just like you) that experience significant distress with the gender they were assigned at birth. Only 0.3% of Americans suffer from this, so it’s understandable that you probably haven’t personally dealt with such a person.

I have.

My God-fearing parents, to whom I owe (almost) everything, allowed me to leave a struggling collegiate effort and tour the country in a band with a famous homosexual female. Can you believe that? I wouldn’t have either, except I only knew my parents as loving, understanding, accepting people.

On the road I earned a full education and then some. Not only did I see 48 of our 50 beautiful states… I met people. Oh, the people I met. Straight people, gay people, young people, old people, and a few transgender people. Two in particular stood out (again, we’re only talking about 0.3% of the total population). Their stories were different (one transitioned from boy to girl, and the other was in the process of girl to boy), but both intrigued me. I asked questions ad nauseam. They answered and I began to understand. This was a real thing and these people weren’t deciding on this path. It was clearly a sad, problematic, and burdensome path they had no choice but to hike.

These discriminatory laws do the opposite of what you want.In your fear, you’re now demanding that fully transitioned people that have beards, big muscles, tattoos, and male genitalia must go into the restroom with your daughter. At the same time, you want fully transitioned people with high heels, breast, and female genitalia to go into the restroom with your husband. Remember, you’re insisting they have to use the restroom aligned with the gender listed on their birth certificate.

More importantly (since male transgender people look like men), you’re giving a FREE PASS for any man to walk into a women’s restroom. After all, that’s where you insist that transgender men should be going.

People are making a mountain where there’s not even a molehill to begin with.Why has this been brought up? Was someone spied on or touched by a transgender person in a public bathroom? Not that I can find.

When has this bothered you? Honestly, you know this has been going on since the invention of public restrooms, right? Are you inspecting people in the public bathroom and if so, when have you seen a transgender person that you felt like was about to harm your babies? You haven’t.

There is a serious child sexual abuse problem, and this idiotic boycott and time wasting laws are abetting it.

90% of children who are sexually abused know their abuser. To my knowledge, I’ve known one pedophile. He was a white, heterosexual choir teacher that befriended me and all of my other prepubescent friends. He wore slacks and a collared shirt as he went into the restroom with all of us. This nonsense legislation wouldn’t have protected my friends from him. He raped them. It’s these situations we need to be vigilant about, not an irrational fear about transgender people (who, in reality, pose no threat–at least not according to the evidence).

American Family Association is the least aptly named association I can think of.I’m a father with a beautiful (in my humble opinion) family. I openly talk to my children about loving and accepting people. We discuss people that are different and try to understand them. It’s the same way I was raised.

It literally makes my head hurt thinking that the American Family Association decides to focus on judging, condemning, and persecuting people, rather than helping and accepting them. Is this what we want the “American family” to be? This is no family of mine.

Stop. Just stop it.Politicians are the worst and this debate is proving that point. Mike Huckabee jokes he should’ve “felt like a woman” and taken showers with girls in high school, while publicly defending admitted child molester Josh Duggar. Gross on all counts.

I understand that things that are different and hard to understand can be scary. Heck, I’ll never understand Florida Georgia Line. But guys, we need to focus on things that are important. This is a political, media-driven issue that does zero good and all kinds of harm. There are real predators where you go to church, where your kids go to school, and sometimes in a trusted family member’s home. Start looking there and stop peeking over the stall.

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Will Lochamy is co-host of the radio show, “Oh Brother Radio” on Birmingham Mountain Radio (107.3FM).

Ugh. What is so hard to understand about this. It’s not the transgender people who are the feared people. Why do you keep saying that and putting down the people who use the brain they have. The problem is with the REST of sicko society that now has a carte blanche to enter whatever bathroom they wish. People who molest, who put cameras in bathrooms, who flash people, are going to go to great lengths to fulfill their ugly desires. Where there used to be a threat of retaliation for these people to enter bathrooms of the opposite sex, now there is none. What’s to hold them back now? They don’t even need to go to great lengths now to get what they want. A simple lie about how they see themselves is fine in a heart beat. Who was to notice when transgenders used their chosen bathroom before? Almost no one. So why make it a rule? Why accuse people of transphobia when they never spoke against trans people using a restroom, but only spoke when rules were made allowing ANYONE into restrooms? Wake up. Stop falsly accusing people.

Hey, former fan.
I have to disagree with you. You seem to think that the sickos have been some type of specific rule followers up to this point. They don’t mind molesting and flashing people, but have great respect for the “women” sign? In no legitimate argument have I seen anyone be ok with or feel the need for cis men using the women’s room. As I stated, the vast majority of the sickos you are referring to are not looking for that two minute window in a Target bathroom and they certainly haven’t been sitting quietly waiting on the sign outside of the door to change.

I’d be intrigued to see real stats from real (non biased) sources to back up your claims. And why does it need to be a majority? If 4 out of 10 men want to put a camera in a women’s restroom, and feel more comfortable now getting away with it, is that any less of a problem than a majority? What if it’s 2 out of 10? Do you think these people are sitting at home thinking, oh well, this has no bearing on me. No, they’re laughing their heads off and making plans. Ask a target employee if they now would feel comfortable or safe asking someone who looks every bit man not to enter a woman’s restroom. Where there was no problem before with trans women using the women’s restroom, now there is more political and social pressure for good people’s hands to be tied. Ask the victims of these kinds of abuses, who are terrified to speak because they will be immediately labeled and villified as attacking and being unloving of others, when they have been (and continue to be) then ones attacked and unloved. In any case, time will show. If this was already a rule, if it was already happening with no harm, why the statement. What this really is, is a stunt by a major corporation, using the trans community to get attention for themselves.

You’re asking for the wrong statistics. There are an estimated 400k sex offenders in the US (and not all of them are interested in getting into the women’s restroom). That’s fewer than there are transgender people in the country. Supporting this law limits the rights and freedoms of citizens who have done nothing wrong in order to attempt (and fail) to prevent people who already don’t care about the law (much less social convention rules about bathroom access) from doing bad things. The 14th Amendment guarantees equal protection under the law and the 5th Amendment requires due process for rights to be taken away from someone. Transgender people haven’t by nature been convicted of a crime in order to have their rights curbed out of fear that a completely different group of people will somehow think it’s easier to do pervy things in a public restroom. Hint: Child-molesting Catholic priests can shower and use the restroom with male children.

Meanwhile, transgender people (including transgender minors) legitimately fear being teased, beaten, raped, and even killed when their transgender status is addressed in public restrooms and locker rooms. This law would make those situations more likely, so you’d be failing to protect women and children from mostly fictional perverts while endangering (trans)women, men, and children.

But the statistics are important:
About 60% of child molesters are known non-family members. Only about 10% are complete strangers. So 30% are family members.

So you need to be more concerned about Uncle Joe or the babysitter rather than the bathroom boogeyman.

Unfortunately, the nonsense started with Government requiring schools to allow free access to the facility of choice for children. There are two articles that you should consider first; http://illinoisfamily.org/uncategorized/pediatricians-call-it-what-it-is-child-abuse/ and http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/michael-w-chapman/johns-hopkins-psychiatrist-transgender-mental-disorder-sex-change. Long story short, we’ve all likely shared facilities with transgenders but when you consider that there is an agenda pushing the acceptance of gender dysphoria as a normative state of mental health, you have to ask yourself why. Big Government was forcing schools to allow facility (bathroom, shower, locker room) of choice, then the city of Charlotte forced it on all businesses which opens the door for the mal-adjusted perverts to claim transgenderism (g.d.) in order to gain access for nefarious purposes, which can and has happened. The ones I really feel for are the transgenders that have been pulling off going unnoticed by anyone until Government had to stick their noses in it. When you look at how the American College of Pediatricians classifies transgender identification before the age of accountability, what Government was forcing was for the schools to sanction child abuse. Now that it’s been splased all over the media, the trans population that has been flying under the radar has been outed and not of their own choosing. If my wife and I happen to go to an environment where the trans policy is allowed for the bathrooms, I will stand guard to ensure that the Village People wannabes do not make it in. The trans population that has been navagating society for so long successfully don’t worry me a bit. I actually feel sorry for them.

I wish coming up I could have identified as a female on the basketball court. I was never very good playing against the males but I dominated when I played against girls. Hopefully my son will be able to play on the girls team and win a state championship like I never did.

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